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A Chiropractor for the Four-Legged Set

At quarter to 11 on Friday morning, only two hours after galloping around the Belmont Park oval, I’ll Have Another yawned contentedly in his stall. He licked his lips. He looked as if he could not be happier.

The reason for this state was Larry Jones. Standing in a pile of straw next to I’ll Have Another, the burly Jones ran a hand-held massager the size of a power tool along the chestnut colt’s hindquarters and back. The colt’s entire body vibrated under the pressure from the so-called Thumper, which also serves as Jones’s nickname.

“He radiates calmly,” Jones said with satisfaction.

Jones, 53, is one of the few equine chiropractors in the horse industry — he stretches, he adjusts, he massages — and he has worked on I’ll Have Another for the trainer Doug O’Neill going back to January and through the Triple Crown races.

On Friday, Jones wore his typical attire — shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with his nickname. He is an avid storyteller — O’Neill joked that “you don’t want to go fishing with Thumper” — and a large presence, a relic of his aborted hockey career in his native Canada. Jones’s size allows him to lift and maneuver half-ton or larger horses, or as he puts it, to “open them up.”

Back problems in his late teens ended Jones’s hopes of a professional hockey career, but that soon led him to horse racing, where he believed he could fix those same maladies. Over the last 30 years, Jones, by his count, has treated more than 41,000 horses in 13 countries, from thoroughbreds to quarter horses and polo horses to jumpers. Though one of the first in the industry, he shies away from being labeled a chiropractor. He has faced skepticism from veterinarians.

“I’m not a chiropractor, I’m a positionalist,” he said. “I set the horses up so they do a biomechanical adjustment themselves. Mechanically, physically, mentally — they have a whole new outlook on their job after. They eat better, digest better, rest better.”

Photo

Larry Jones adjusts, stretches and massages clients like I’ll Have Another, who is making a run at the Triple Crown.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Jones uses automobile metaphors to describe his work. A horse’s hind end is its transmission, where the power comes from, and that is where Jones focuses. Problems many horses face begin with back soreness. Jones demonstrated on a 3-year-old bay colt named Brian, owned by J. Paul Reddam, the owner of I’ll Have Another, the winner of the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes.

It is initially shocking to see a large animal twisted to and fro, but the normally prickly Brian stood calmly with a groom as Jones picked up each leg and bent it, rocked it back and forth, extended it fully, swung it to the side. He yanked back Brian’s front legs to open his shoulder and cranked his neck to each side. Then he reclined against the colt’s side and held a carrot in his far hand as Brian craned his neck to nip it. Jones did the same from underneath his belly.

“Yesterday he was biting everybody in sight,” Jones said. “Now look at him. He doesn’t care.”

Jones grew up in Alberta and spent time around horses from the age of 11. But hockey was his first love, and he played two years in the elite junior Western Hockey League for the New Westminster Bruins. One day in practice before his final season, Jones skated over a piece of a broken stick and dislocated his back. He said he was never the same on the ice. Surgery did not help, and then he saw a chiropractor.

“After 12 days I walked out of there straight as a board,” he said.

Jones slid into the world of chuck wagon horses at events like the Calgary Stampede, with races in which drivers steer a cart hauled by four horses roped together in pairs. They must move as one, and Jones noticed that when one horse was off mechanically, it would upset the rhythm of the team.

Jones spent years of trial and error practicing his horsemanship, and by the late 1980s he had contributed to several Calgary Stampede-winning barns. He moved to thoroughbreds at Hastings Racecourse in Vancouver and found success there with a trainer named George Cummings. In the early 1990s, with a loftier stage in sight, Cummings told Jones to go south.

Jones gutted a 1946 Greyhound bus and turned it into his mobile home, a living arrangement he kept through two more buses until 2005. Success came in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, and after much skepticism among Southern California trainers, the Hall of Fame trainer Charlie Whittingham gave him a break.

Photo

Larry Jones, who calls himself a “positionalist,” treating a colt named Brian.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

“He had two horses who hadn’t run in six and seven months,” Jones recalled. “He said to me, ‘If you can do anything for these horses, go at it.’ I worked on them and they both ran a month later and won. That was my springboard.”

Jones and his partner, Reo King, whom Jones had mentored in Canada, were then approached by top trainers like D. Wayne Lukas and Jack Van Berg. Jones found assignments near and far — with polo horses in Argentina and quarter horses in New Mexico — and recently opened a rehabilitation farm in Morgan Mill, Tex., with his wife Laurie.

In the winter of 2008, O’Neill hired Jones and King. O’Neill had a stellar barn, with the $5 million winner Lava Man — now I’ll Have Another’s pony — as the star. O’Neill’s horses ended up setting a record for wins at that Santa Anita meet.

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“He’s well sought after around the world,” O’Neill said of Jones. “It takes a horseman and a big-bodied person to do their work, and they don’t have much competition in that area.”

Last January, Jones and King returned to California to work on O’Neill’s 70 horses, including I’ll Have Another.

“He was sitting in the corner with his head down,” Jones said of seeing I’ll Have Another at the time. The colt had been sidelined with sore shins and had not raced in months, since losing in Saratoga’s Hopeful Stakes. “He wasn’t depleted but he looked, what’s the right word, lethargic.”

Jones and King came back monthly and Jones has watched I’ll Have Another grow into a favorite to end the 34-year Triple Crown drought in next Saturday’s Belmont Stakes. Win or lose, Jones will be in I’ll Have Another’s stall that night.

“After the Preakness, everybody else was celebrating and partying, but not me,” Jones said. “I was in his stall four hours after the race. I went through him and gave him a massage. The next day the security guard told me that he cleaned his bin in an hour and by 12:15 he was snoring like a human.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 2, 2012, on Page D7 of the New York edition with the headline: A Chiropractor for the Four-Legged Set. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe